Edmund Cooper

Edmund Cooper (April 30, 1926 – March 11, 1982) was an English poet and prolific writer of speculative fiction, romances, technical essays, several detective stories, and a children's book. These were published under his own name and several pen names.

It is the nature of men to act negatively but to dream and hope positively.

It is not in the nature of man to accept permanent failure.

He who expects little is rarely disappointed.

All fanaticism springs from the religious impulse.

All living things sustain each other. All living things depend upon death not as an end, an absolute completion, but as a beginning of a new rhythm, a way of fulfillment in passing on the restless force of life.

For death is only a loss of radiance , and birth is only the beginning of a separate journey.

But in adversity, intelligence alone cannot sustain hope. Ultimately, hope can be sustained only by finding purpose in adversity, by imposing a pattern on the fortuitous disasters of existence. Human beings, if force to it, will compromise their intelligence to preserve their hope.

For mankind may survive and live without machines, and still be civilised. But without compassion, the human race can only elaborate upon the futile cunning and the barren intelligence of the great apes.

Thus, ultimately, there never could be an absolute end; just as there never could have been an absolute beginning. There could only be a continuous unfolding.

Those who look for death have to wait patiently till death finds those who look.

Mankind has never been renowned for accepting logical solutions to its most serious problems. As a rule, the degre of logicality of solutions seemed to vary inversely with the urgency or seriousness of the problems.

I am rebelling against imprisonment, I am rebelling against tyranny of the mind, I am rebelling against a collection of machines with interchangeable faces. Above all, I am rebelling against my own ignorance and your deliberate deception.

In some way the material universe appears to be passing away like a tale that is told, dissolving into nothingness like a vision.